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So, among the side drama is Polygon, a fairly new game site that was a sort of offshoot off the Verge. With credentials like that I figured it'd be good, but apparently they're the epitome of gaming journalism today. One of their journalists is apparently keen on shoving his foot in this mouth.

After today's revelations, the internet has been pounding at his Twitter door, looking for repentance. They found none.

I particularly enjoy the ass covering/goal post moving of the last statement.

Is there still the concept of the passage of time and the attendant rise of new technlogy in this new game? In SC2K, you started-out far in the past and major technologies didn't arrive until substantial periods of time had passed.

Always-Connected is a big change from SimCities of the past. It didn’t come down as an order from corporate and it isn’t a clandestine strategy to control players. It’s fundamental to the vision we had for this SimCity. From the ground up, we designed this game with multiplayer in mind – using new technology to realize a vision of players connected in regions to create a SimCity that captured the dynamism of the world we live in; a global, ever-changing, social world.

If only this had landed on Facebook as originally intended.

We put a ton of effort into making our simulation and graphics engines more detailed than ever and to give players lively and responsive cities. We also made innovative use of servers to move aspects of the simulation into the cloud to support region play and social features. Here’s just a few:

• We keep the simulation state of the region up to date for all players. Even when playing solo, this keeps the interactions between cities up to date in a shared view of the world.

• Players who want to reach the peak of each specialization can count on surrounding cities to provide services or resources, even workers. As other players build, your city can draw on their resources.

• Our Great Works rely on contributions from multiple cities in a region. Connected services keep each player’s contributions updated and the progression on Great Works moving ahead.

•All of our social world features - world challenges, world events, world leaderboards and world achievements - use our servers to update the status of all cities.

• Our servers handle gifts between players.

•We’ve created a dynamic supply and demand model for trading by keeping a Global Market updated with changing demands on key resources.

• We update each city’s visual representation as well. If you visit another player’s city, you’ll see the most up to date visual status.

• We even check to make sure that all the cities saved are legit, so that the region play, leaderboards, challenges and achievements rewards and status have integrity.

…and the sad part is, most people would rather have the flexibility to play offline than have all that. I also challenge your use of the word 'innovative'.

BTW:

“With the way that the game works, we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud. It wouldn’t be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team.”

The calculations listed above do not sound 'significant'.

Cloud-based saves and easy access from any computer are another advantage of our connected features. You can pop from work to home, play the game and have your cities available to you anywhere.

Yep, so many of us want to play from work. Thanks for that.

Almost all of our players play with connected cities.

But some chose to play alone – running the cities themselves. But whether they play solo or multiplayer, they are drawn to the connected city experience.

Likely because its mandatory.

The game we launched is only the beginning for us – it’s not final and it never will be. In many ways, we built an MMO.

Well, you built the launch experience of an MMO, at least.

So, could we have built a subset offline mode? Yes. But we rejected that idea because it didn’t fit with our vision.

Ahem:

We have no intention of offlining SimCity any time soon but we'll look into that as part of our earning back your trust efforts.

So I guess you weren't going to look into it?

We recognize that there are fans – people who love the original SimCity – who want that.

..and since the word 'option' is not in our vocabulary, we dismissed it.

But we’re also hearing from thousands of people who are playing across regions, trading, communicating and loving the Always-Connected functionality.

So they're loving those features that you guys disabled early on to lighten the server load? SimCity players prescient confirmed.

The SimCity we delivered captures the magic of its heritage but catches up with ever-improving technology.

As EA forum member LeLedg and others have accidentally discovered in a thread about customers trying to make a legitimate SimCity complaints, EA is preventing the customer assistance hotline number from even appearing in the forums. When you type out the number 866-543-5435, it is replaced by an asterisk, a common message board function typically used to block course language. Just to be safe, the forum-goers typed other permutations of the number in addition to completely different phone numbers -- it's only EA's number that's censored.

We also spoke to Azzer about the rather strange happenings with the threads related to his mod vanishing from the EA forums. A series of tweets from, Erik Reynolds, “senior director of worldwide communications” (but apparently not mathematics), explained that he was going to be “1000% clear”.
…

“In the past we’ve supported the modding community and in the future we are committed to supporting. Hacks are not mods.”

Anybody want to venture a guess what the hell is the difference between a hack and a mod is?

First, I find it compelling that one of the tacts Maxis has taken in defending this online-only strategy is under the guise of artistic integrity. I've seen Bradshaw quoting their 'vision' and it laughable every single time. This is the publisher from whom this argument is least believable. (I don't know what Bradshaw's background is, but given her statements she reads as not a developer but more a corporate shill, making it twice as ridiculous)

Second: I'm enthralled by the look of the game. The tilt-shift use to enhance the already miniature aspect is genius. It's part of the reason why despite everything I'm still hungry for this. (The other reason – I've never played a SimCity other than the original on SNES)

I also can't get over how much this
reminds me of this:

3. It's amazing how they completely nailed the presentation, yet utterly failed on the underlying mechanics. I can understand the non-persistent sims and the bad traffic, but reading about people creating industry free towns exploiting the use of parks, it's pretty depressing.

4. Between how blatantly anti-consumer the game was made, and how much EA has flat-out lied about it, I have a hard time not condoning someone pirating this game (if EA never relents to an offline mode). The greatest irony being their attempt to prevent piracy with always online is likely what will drive so much of it in the end. I"m not one to quote Star Wars, but more you tighten your grip, the more slip through your fingers line comes to mind.

5. Watching this game on Youtube is torture. I can watch Minecraft videos to learn and for ideas, or DOTA 2 because I just don't understand, but SimCity – just watching people make stupid decisions or simple mistakes or ignore obvious things or just not understand the game (which I haven't played) is maddening. I've been wanting to pull my SNES out of storage just because of it.

Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: EA) today announced that SimCity™ recorded more than 1.1 million units sold through in the first two weeks, making this the biggest SimCity launch of all time. Roughly 54 percent of those sales have been of digital versions of the game, downloaded directly to players’ PCs via Origin™ or other digital download services.

Roughly 54% had a rats ass of a chance of getting a refund, if they so desired.

in the last two weeks, they have increased server capacity by more than 400%

And social features still haven't been reenabled. They were ready for 20% of what they actually got. That's not a miscalculation, that's ignorance.

NeoGAF predicting Lucy's next press release:

"As the numbers clearly demonstrate, our fans are loving the always on connectivity of the new SimCity."

Edit: Political tangent, but when people claim the free market economy regulates itself, I have to point to shit like this to show, nope, consumers are not rational participants.

I'm enthralled by the look of the game. The tilt-shift use to enhance the already miniature aspect is genius. It's part of the reason why despite everything I'm still hungry for this. (The other reason – I've never played a SimCity other than the original on SNES)

Same feeling here.

I didn't know the original Sim City was on SNES? I had Sim CIty 2000 on SNES, but that was after already playing it extensively on my old iMac. My only exposure to the original Sim City was on an old friend's Mac Quadra.

Edit: As an aside, we are all clearly part of the problem if (when?) we buy this game.

The EA CEO who just stepped down was the crazy who demanded social features in every single player game (hence that silly Galactic Readiness or whatever it was called in ME3), but the temporary replacement is his predecessor who I remember as being even worse. I hope the final replacement is someone who understands games.

Anyway, I think he has been on his way out for a while, and SimCity was either the final straw or something that happened when it was already decided.

The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.

Anyway, I think he has been on his way out for a while, and SimCity was either the final straw or something that happened when it was already decided.

The general feeling is SWTOR sealed his fate - $200 million for a not very successful MMO. The ongoing SimCity debacle plus the ending of the fiscal year gave way for good timing to ask for his resignation.

Originally Posted by P

The EA CEO who just stepped down was the crazy who demanded social features in every single player game (hence that silly Galactic Readiness or whatever it was called in ME3), but the temporary replacement is his predecessor who I remember as being even worse. I hope the final replacement is someone who understands games.

More than 40 million people could be affected by a vulnerability researchers uncovered in EA's Origin online game platform allowing attackers to remotely execute malicious code on players' computers.

The attack, demonstrated on Friday at the Black Hat security conference in Amsterdam, takes just seconds to execute. In some cases, it requires no interaction by victims, researchers from Malta-based ReVuln (@revuln) told Ars. It works by manipulating the uniform resource identifiers EA's site uses to automatically start games on an end user's machine. By exploiting flaws in the Origin application available for both Macs and PCs, the technique turns EA's popular game store into an attack platform that can covertly install malware on customers' computers

The general feeling is SWTOR sealed his fate - $200 million for a not very successful MMO. The ongoing SimCity debacle plus the ending of the fiscal year gave way for good timing to ask for his resignation.

Let's not forget about the failed NBA Live games. Two reboots and no game to show for it. How much money did they lose on that?

We’re sure that British Petroleum, AIG, Philip Morris, and Halliburton are all relieved they weren’t nominated this year. We’re going to continue making award-winning games and services played by more than 300 million people worldwide.

As a reminder, this is a reviews editor at a gaming site. His logic is particularly baffling given that within the context of his job, he must think all the writers should be making games rather than pointing out the flaws, etc.

'Course someone on GAF pointed out this gem from one of his reviews:

Games this thoughtfully crafted don't happen very often, and the care that Blizzard has taken with Diablo 3 shows in every facet of its design and execution. It might not be perfect, but after 45 hours, I'm not sure where it missteps, and after 45 hours, I feel like I've only scratched the surface of what it has to offer. Diablo 3 is almost evil in how high a bar it's set for every PC action RPG to follow, and I wouldn't be surprised to see that bar remain for a very long time.

10/10

Conclusion? The games journalism industry is known for being an unethical lightweight, partly because many of the journalists are actually angling for corporate positions in PR. Within that context Gies behavior makes an amazing amount of sense.

As a reminder, this is a reviews editor at a gaming site. His logic is particularly baffling given that within the context of his job, he must think all the writers should be making games rather than pointing out the flaws, etc.

FYI: Dr. Pizza is Peter Bright from Ars Technica, famous forum troll turned frontpage contributor, who - despite not really being a games journalist - sort-of reviewed Sim City before the official launch, and gave it a terrible review even without the server issues.

The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.

Public Service Announcement: There are only a few Mac games in there - for some reason many of games with Mac ports only have a PC version on Origin. Two of the few Mac games are Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2. You might note that DA2, despite being newer, is the cheaper of the two. That is not an accident. DA:O is a good game, and worth checking out if you like the classic RPGs but want a modern interface and graphics. DA2 is a crime against humanity.

The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.

No MMO can compare to the financial disaster that is Star Wars: The Old Republic. Developed by BioWare, The Old Republic was going to be the greatest Sci-Fi MMO of all time and feature both compelling multi-player and an extensive single-player campaign, all highlighted by over 300 hours worth of spoken dialogue.

The Old Republic sold very well during its first month at retail, but the sky high sales numbers did not turn into monthly subscribers. The "End Game" of The Old Republic was maligned by both players and critics. Soon, EA had to abandon the subscription model for the The Old Republic and made the whole game F2P (free-to-play). The implementation of the F2P model with The Old Republic further soured the game in the eyes of many fans, by locking them out of Spec Ops missions unless they signed up for a subscription.

Things continued taking a turn for the worst when they released Medal of Honor: Warfighter. last year It was a complete failure in sales.

Between the failure of Medal of Honor: Warfighter and The Old Republic, EA was knocked out of the NASDAQ Top 100 this past December.

When you sell a game like Sim City for $60, but wind up shelling out a refund of a free game valued from $10 to $40, depending on which one the gamer chooses, that is not going to look good on the bottom line. That bottom line, despite the early critical success of Ricciello's tenure as EA CEO, is all that really matters to the shareholders.

Jesus, when the hell did skins start costing more than the damn game itself? It amazes me that they charge for this shit instead of getting the player to unlock those rewards. Unfortunately, they're doing it again like they did with Gears 3 because people are stupid enough to pay for that crap!